September 2, 2004 (Computerworld) --
A welfare case management and telephony system worth some $806.5 million is in danger of being unplugged if the agency overseeing it cannot fix technical and procedural processes in the next several months. The implementation involves a Java-based, custom-written application from integrator Electronic Data Systems Corp. that's meant to handle case management for the U.K.'s Child Support Agency (CSA). The agency oversees the assessment and collection of child support payments from separated parents. It also includes a telephone call center system from BT Group PLC's consulting and systems integration business. The mixed CSA application and telephony system was the subject of a damning report issued in July by Parliament's Select Committee on Work and Pensions, the legislative body charged with oversight of the CSA. The complaints about the CSA system include missed implementation deadlines, an inability to migrate existing cases to the new system, a telephony system that provides an "appalling level of service" and a backlog of 170,000 cases that grows by 30,000 each quarter. Additionally, the two systems haven't worked well together, "with customers' calls being routed to the wrong place and cases disappearing from the caseworker's screen as staff try to answer a telephone inquiry." The committee recommended that if the telephony system isn't fully functional by May, it should be abandoned and replaced. The committee also said that if the CSA application isn't fully operational to process new cases by Dec. 1 -- and if the agency can't guarantee the ability to migrate existing cases by May 2005 -- then a contingency plan should be readied. The options the CSA is due to present by February 2005 could include unplugging the system altogether. The committee also urged the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP), of which the CSA is a part, to conduct a "full postmortem" as soon as possible into the troubled project.
The DWP has two months to respond to the recommendations of the special committee, said one of its members, Rob Marris. Although that deadline is flexible, he said the response would most likely be coming next month. "We are not saying the system should be abandoned come December," he said. "What we are saying is the government should draw a line in the sand if DWP cannot come up with a guarantee." Because of the problems with the new system, the legacy system, with its very complex payment formulas, has to be run in parallel. That constitutes a large expense for the government, although exactly how much more the move is costing isn't clear. With both systems running, some people are on the old system, while others are on the new. Marris
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